X introduces the Stories feature, with news summarized by Grok AI: City Telegraph

X, formerly known as Twitter, has adopted Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok to enhance a new feature in the app’s Explore section. According to an announcement and screenshots shared by the X Engineering team, X Premium subscribers can now access personalized summaries of popular stories in the app’s For You tab in Discover. These summaries provide a quick overview of posts related to each trending story, allowing users to efficiently stay up to date with relevant content.

The For You page shows the news and stories shared on X’s platform that are popular within your network, along with other suggested items. It’s one of the first stops for X users who want to stay on top of what’s being said on the platform, without having to spend a lot of time scrolling through their timeline.

For example, a TechCrunch reader’s For You page today might feature stories about Apple’s upcoming iPad event, Microsoft’s security overhaul, and burnout among AI engineers. As you visit each story to view its associated X-posts, a summary of the story will now appear at the top of the page, providing an overview of the topic.

For example, in the case of the AI ​​burnout story, the Grok-driven summary begins: “AI engineers are facing burnout and hasty deployments due to the competitive race in the tech industry as companies prioritize satisfaction of investors over solving actual problems.” After briefly addressing the problem of AI’s “rat race,” the story concludes by noting that “critics argue that proper safeguards and thoughtful innovation should not be an afterthought in pursuing AI investments…”

Humorously, a message appears below that summary warning: “Grok may make mistakes and verify their results.”

The idea of ​​summarizing trends is not new, but it is new in terms of the way the summaries are handled. Under his previous leadership, Twitter began adding headlines and descriptions to its trends in 2020, but not with the help of an AI bot. Instead, Twitter itself annotated some of its daily trends with additional information and posted a representative tweet to provide more context. However, Twitter’s rollout was haphazard, with some trends described and others not.

Grok’s Stories, as the summaries are called, summarizes all the top news on the For You page.

Access to xAI’s chatbot Grok is intended as a selling point to entice users to purchase premium subscriptions. The top tier Premium and Premium+ plans allow users to access Grok by tapping the center button at the bottom of the app. A snarky and “rebellious” AI, what sets Grok apart from other AI chatbots like ChatGPT is its exclusive and real-time access to X data.

a message published to X on Friday by technology journalist Alex Kantrowitz explains Elon Musk’s further plan for AI-powered news about

Kantrowitz says conversations about X will be at the heart of Grok’s summaries. In other words, Grok doesn’t look at the article text, even if that’s what people are discussing on the platform. That could be a problem when it comes to painting a true picture of the news being shared, because what people on X are chatting about could be their reactions or opinions, and not the news itself. Kantrowitz calls the step ‘controversial’, but admits that there are opportunities.

Journalists are already dealing with AI news overviews in other areas, including from startups. For example, Arc’s new web browser includes an AI summary feature, and former Twitter engineers are building an AI news summary service called Particle. How this will play out in terms of traffic to the news sites themselves remains to be seen. Kantrowitz believes users may be interested in “diving deeper into the source material once their curiosity is piqued,” he writes. But it’s also likely that at least some news sites will go out of business as page views decline due to AI summarization, leaving fewer resources for AI bots like Grok to summarize in the long run.

For that reason, some news publishers are making deals with AI providers, such as OpenAI’s recently announced partnership with the FT. Others, such as Axel Springer, the AP and Le Monde, have also announced similar steps. In X’s case, he can reach the news through the conversation surrounding it – and without having to collaborate to access the news content itself. That is both smart and worrying, the latter from a disinformation perspective.

Grok’s Stories are now rolling out to Premium X subscribers. Access Premium starts at $8 per month, if you pay online and not through the app stores.